Abstract
As early as 1968, the fifth merits judgment of the European Court of Human Rights established that civil and political rights could generate action obligations on the European States. This judgment was challenging the usual definition of those rights, which were traditionally considered as charging the public authorities with only negative obligations. In contrast, economic, social and cultural rights were positioned as imposing positive obligations on the public authorities. The European Court of Human Rights has since created an increasing number of positive obligations and several techniques were developed for this purpose. This study aims to explore the “positive obligations technique”, that is to say, the Court's use of the terms “positive obligations” or “positive measures”. This technique not only allows the Court judge to impose action obligations on the European States, also recognizes the Court judge's competence to monitor the implementation by the public authorities of its own decisions, to give a horizontal effect to the Convention and to extend the concept of "jurisdiction" within the meaning of Article 1 ECHR. This technique also permits to modulate the Court's control over the European States, granting a wide margin of appreciation or reducing it to nothing. The increasing diversification of the use of this technique in European case law is however a source of discrepancy.. This thesis aims to demonstrate that the technique of positive obligations is a tool for adaptation of the conventional norma to the changes of the democratic and liberal European States.